Further Reading

DeepMind's Go-playing program AlphaGo played against Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol in March. Lee lost to the computer 4-1. Although Lee was the world's top-rated Go player between 2007 and 2011 and is widely considered to be one of the greatest Go players the world has ever seen, he was only ranked number four in the world when he played against AlphaGo.

For the last couple of years the world's best Go player (by Elo score) has been Ke Jie, a Chinese child prodigy. Back in March, after AlphaGo had won the first game of the match with Lee, Ke said that “I don’t want to compete with AlphaGo because judging from its matches with Lee, AlphaGo is weaker than me. I don’t want AlphaGo to copy my style." He did some bragging on his Weibo account, too: “Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Se-dol, it can’t beat me."

Later, after AlphaGo had picked up three games in a row from Lee, 18-year old Ke revised his stance a little: “AlphaGo was perfect and made no mistake. If the conditions are the same, it is highly likely that I can lose.”

Now it seems that Ke Jie will get to find out for certain whether he's still the best Go player in the world. According to Xinhua, International Go Federation executive member Yang Jun’an announced on Sunday that Ke Jie will play against AlphaGo before the end of the year. No further details were given as to where the games might be played—only that discussions are ongoing and both sides are "inclined to make it happen."

When asked for confirmation by Ars, a Google DeepMind spokesperson said that the DeepMind team is "still exploring options for AlphaGo's next steps, but don't have anything to share at this time."

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Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb